 Hello, everybody. We are back. Lady, what is this? Hey, everybody, and welcome to show and tell. This is our live 30-ish minute long show where people from around the makeup community all over the world in the known universe beam in and show us on the viewfinder screen. What is it that they're working on? Were the coding, 3D printing, soldering, blinking, and more? I'll check in with some Adafruit folks and then any other visitors who come by. We're on Discord. Programming it last week. We took the week off. It's tax season and we're a small business, so we had to get a bunch of stuff going. Then we had family visit on Sundays, so it was no-descalated, but back to our normal schedule. Next week, show and tell, some 30 p.m. Eastern time, come by, and then next week, special Adabox unboxing. Adabox is back after the- But we'll still have show and tell. Yeah, we're still going to do show and tell. But after the long park shortage, and people being super patient and super cool, Adabox shipped all the folks got the Adaboxes, so next week is the unboxing brought to you by JP. With that being said, let's kick off our show and tell this week with Liz. Liz, what's going on this week? Behind me is one of the Elgato key lights, and these lights can be controlled over HTTP with an app. But we thought it'd be cool to try to control it with Circuit Python using this feather. When I press this button, the light comes on. And I can press it again, toza. So put it there, and then I can control the brightness or the color temperature with this rotary encoder. So right there, the temperature is going up, and I'll put it all the way up so that you can really see the difference, such as how it goes. And then make the warm. Oh, I see, so it's going to be cool, okay. Yeah, and I'll put it all the way back down to cool. And then you can also change the brightness. So I'll put up to 100. Super bright. Oh my goodness. Yes, and then back there. So you figured out the protocol, and theoretically, do you need to use the app at all, or now you can just not even use it? You don't need to use the app. A lot of folks have done a lot of protocol sniffing on it, so I found two really good resources that I'll link in the guide when I write this up. And another thing I added, because I do have the app on my computer, and I'll just quickly change it to warm. I also am reading from it, so if I press this button, it will, whoops. Oh, you can say it. It will crash. Yes, it will crash, but it should in theory read the data back from the light. And so on first boot, it reads from the light and should go there. But yeah, so I'm going to be writing a guide for that, and it got the new value there. Yeah, we have a look, too, and it does. I thought this would be useful for you, because this could make a thing that we could, what have you, having to plug stuff in, maybe we would have a little controller. Yeah, just for folks who have all these type of lights and systems, one of the things about rolling your own software is handy, is operating systems change, you get updated, the apps don't always work, so if you know the protocol, you can make your own. Also, if you're an old timer, kind of like me, you know how you'd buy a laptop back in the day, it'd be like Sony, and it would come like a ton of apps, and you'd be like, I got to get rid of these apps, and it would be like bloatware. Not that Elgato's software is bloatware, but it is another app that you're going to be running, and it's nice to not have to run someone else's app, and you also know what it's doing. So that's kind of cool that you can do your own app, but also make some physical hardware stuff instead. Yes, definitely, yeah. So, and it's a cool project. And I thought maybe it would be good for you to have this light, and you could use it for like your video, and I was like, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, advanced things that you could do with this, you could have a sensor, so you just moved your hand over something, and it sends the same type of things like, oh, turn these lights on, turn them off. You can do all sorts of stuff with it. Yeah, definitely. Right, great project. And I really like using the feather with the TFT built in there, and then there's the buttons, so. You can tell what's going on. Handy, and then, yeah, solderless project is everything, so you can just stem a cute one. You can also do things like, have it do ambient stuff, where the lighting of where your app changes, it changes. Although it can't do that, but you could do that, you could have a sensor go in and have it change it based on that. Exactly, yeah. Cool. All right, thanks so much for this. No problem, have a good one. All right, JP, what you got going on this week? Hey, so it's been family visit time. You guys had a visit. I actually went out and saw my folks for a couple of days, and I came home with a piece of gear, then this is something I wanted to show. This was my dad's first real camera. He got this in 1960, in somewhere near Lubeck, Germany. He was stationed there in the Army, and he got this super cool Kodak Retina Reflex S, which was made in Germany, designed and made in Germany. There was a German camera company that Kodak had bought at one point, and this was an interchangeable lens SLR, so you can look through the lens and then it has a mirror that lifts up the, lifts up when you're taking the photo. And there were two cool things I wanted to show about this. One of them was just the analog light meter. So this thing that looks like a bug eye, this camera takes no batteries, and yet it has a light meter. And if I take a little piece of paper and reflect some light onto bounce off of here, you'll see that little meter going up and down, and that's, I think it's just essentially a super sensitive magnet, what's the word I'm looking for, like electromagnetic coil that the light is actually exciting causing that little meter to go, which is pretty amazing. And there was a little diffuser, you can slide onto that too, if you're looking for a different type of light metering, I think on a sunny day. Excuse me, the other thing I wanted to show, which is I've been doing a lot of photography with our Memento camera lately, and the things that really come up a lot with getting the lighting right and the focus right and the sharpness right in your photos is typically the shutter speed, the aperture, and then the focal distance of the lens. And so one of the really neat things they did on this was just to be kind of extra, I think, and help you out, is you can adjust things like focus with a little ring here. And so that number you see there is essentially how many feet away we're focusing on. So for focus on something seven feet away with the aperture, which is what's letting the light in at its current setting, we should actually get things that are maybe as close to six feet and out near 10 feet. That's what these two little red lines indicate. Super cool thing is if you change that aperture using this little wheel at the bottom, they coupled that to those two little indicators there. So you can see if we're letting more and more and more light in, so this is the widest the aperture can get down here at 2.8. I don't know why it says 1.9 because this lens only goes to 2.8. It is now basically just gonna give you eight, 10 inches of focus, everything else will be out of focus. As we get a smaller and smaller aperture all the way down to a little pinhole at 22, now we're gonna get a really deep focus there. And so I love that they put that extra touch in there. This camera and the line it's from has been described as being wildly, German-ly over-engineered and it's built like a tank, it's heavy, it's a beautiful camera. I think it may need a little servicing. I don't know that the shutter closes every time properly. I've been kind of peeking in there, but I will see if I can get it working and put some film through it. I love it. This is so brawn-esque, you know. It's like the metal, the brushed metal with the little red and black markings. It's... They even have this nice embossing back here. And this was the case that it came with. This is the top half. There's also like a sleeve that goes around it. Is that real leather? It's leather. Yeah, it's gorgeous. You can see it was probably heated and formed. Yeah, there's no cracking on it this video. No, it's in great shape. My dad, I'll tell you, he keeps things in immaculate condition including all the instructions in little. This is in that. So I'm really excited that he made it. Look at that red and the logo. They're just like... Yeah, it's gorgeous. Here's the little lens cloth, some little booklet. And this is the diffuser. So good. This is a camera that looks like what people design 3D icons to look like camera. Yes. Yeah, it is iconic. Yeah. All right. So nice. Very cool. What's your schedule for shows in the next week? I've got a workshop show tomorrow and then I'll be back on Tuesday with a product pick of the week. So I'm back to my usual hijinks and then we'll have the unboxing on Wednesday. So I hope people come out for that, especially if you've got an eight a box in the mail and you wanna check it out and unbox it with me, please join. Yeah, right on. And we'll show your product pick of the week from the week before on Ask an Engineer tonight. Hey, how are you today? Next JP. All right, next up we're gonna go to Sun and Moon and then we'll go to Mark and then Nanographics. Take it away. Hey guys. Today, I wanna show you this fan. I'm just setting it up real quick. This was originally a design by WoW Electron. He usually makes like a mask to go over your face. It's very nice. It opens and closes. He actually sent me the PCBs for this and I have since modified them, but I can show you. I did not know how to do PCBs until he sent me these files. This is what the one in the fan looks like. And those are WS2812s. And what's cool about this is so you have voltage data ground at the bottom. The data out on the top actually loops back to the bottom. I'm holding this upside down. Actually loops back to the bottom. So that's what allows you to daisy chain these with wires just at the bottom. So I got into easy EDA so I could order these from JLC. And then once I saw the files, I was like, I can modify these. So this was the new version that I used for the, where'd they go? Ah, for the poi that I think I've shown on this episode. And I just ordered a new version that came here in a giant box that was about the size of my X1C. And I don't know why they did that. This is a tiny, tiny little, this is actually a flex PCB. Well. I've now got it up to 116 pixels. And these are SK9822s. So they're gonna be really high refresh rate. And these are gonna be the new version in my poi that eventually when I'm done, hopefully we can open source this design and you guys can make it at home. Cause it's, it's again, it's based off of the EDA fruit like the Genesis and the dot the old. What was the other one? Supernova? Yep. All right. Very cool. We'll keep coming back and showing these. If folks want to see kind of the collection you can probably go to the last few show and tells and scrub through and do like a little bit of a super cup. But do you have fan poi? Sure. Show me things to mention. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see what other shapes and form factors you continue to do as like now there's flex PCB available. Oh yeah. Easily. Now that I know how to do PCBs as well just sky's the limit. Right on. All right. Well, great stuff coming back. All right. Thanks. All right. We're gonna get a mark and then nanographs Mark, what you got going on? Hi. Just a quick update on a couple of weeks ago when I was working on the controller for flight simulators, I managed to hook it up just on a 3D printed back plate and added extra buttons that now, I don't know if I can zoom in further here just slightly, that are now replicating this whole area on a controller or on the flight simulator controller which is really useful for setting your flight plans. Now I'm too zoomed in. But makes it really easy to control it all but I basically showed all that last week and the only addition is buttons and that's not that exciting. But I did just finish writing up a playground guide on how I did all this and how it's hooked into Moby Flight. Really easy to do. You don't need to build something this complex. You can just use some buttons. There's lots of buttons and switches on planes that you can map to wherever you want. It's a good practical use for using the game controllers that CircuitPython lets you build. And this actually goes well. I also wrote another playground guide that you guys I think featured a couple of weeks ago that talks about how to create the device descriptors for your controllers. So using the two of those, hopefully some people can make their own controllers for flight simulators or other games or whatever else. You could compete against Boeing, make your own planes. Mine don't fall apart as easy. Actually that's a lie, mine do. Your playground nets are really good. Thanks for putting them up because this is a common thing people want to build. And I was like, I don't play these games or sims. So I don't, you know, I'm like, I don't have any insight but you know, somebody who knows the sim knows what is the most useful interface. Yeah, the trends I've been seeing for all the sims that are out there is people want hardware that goes along with the sim. So if they're like doing a truck simulator or a car simulator or a plane simulator, they want actual physical buttons to go along with it. But that's really hard to do. There's some commercial stuff. There's some closer stuff. There's some like keyboard mapping stuff but nothing like this where you're actually making your own devices interact with it directly so we have all the HID support. This is really cool. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, the circuit Python makes it really quick and I think it's a lot more accessible to beginners. I know that's not a good thing but it's now maybe too easy to make your own controller. It's easy, it's easy. Yeah, you know what maybe one of the things we'll do down the road too is make some like control panels for folks so they can like make their own. Like maybe there'll be some dials and knobs and like you can like mission control type things or something like that and you can put it all together in some type of standard but we'll see. Yeah, there's lots of opportunities. One thing I like about Moby Flight I haven't got to try yet is it can actually support outputs as well. So people will map say your radio frequency back to a seven segment LED display. Yeah, but like a little gauge that we sell those in the store. So you want to have like an old school altimeter or whatever. Yeah, I've seen like commercial things where it's like if you want a really special like switch or something like you pop open the switch and you flip it and you turn dials and it's basically a keyboard, it's USB keyboard. I mean, we can make some Yeah, maybe not. Doing stuff like this. All right, thanks so much, Mark. No problem. All right. Yeah, graphics. Hey everyone. Would you like to go on? Yeah. Yeah, cool. Small. The microscope was only a little bit cranky turning on today. So I am still changing the sample out but that gives me kind of a chance to show you all what that is. Yeah. But this is the sample exchange rod. This microscope is kind of nice because we don't have to vent the entire sample chamber to get a sample out. So I'm pulling out the AMG-8033 thermal camera we had last week. Yeah. Gonna put that in a case. And I've got kind of a weird sample today. Instead of looking at the sample with the microscope we're going to use the sample to look at the microscope with the microscope. Well. I'm putting in what's effectively an electron mirror. Yeah, so I'll show you that on camera real quick. It's an electron mirror. It's just a little piece of plastic, little round ball. Yeah. Very round. Yeah. And we're going to hit it with the electron beam and the electrons are going to get stuck in it because electrons need a conductor to go somewhere. And without said conductor they are not going to have a path to ground. And if they don't have a path to ground they are just going to get stuck in the sample. Okay. So I have got my sticky tape on this thing. So I'm going to just stick that on. Now my sticky tape is kind of weak. So I'm going to put new sticky tape down. There's nobody after me, is there? Nope, no, no. Okay, cool. Yeah, we tried to, when I see you on the chat I try to give you a bucket of time because you're usually showing some tiny things and some demos. I really appreciate it. You got some room. So I got my new sticky tape on. Did you see the movie interspace where you get shrunk down and they go inside the human body on Martin shore? I've seen a little bit of it, but yeah. So there we go. We've got our little round plastic ball on the end of my sample exchange rod. So I'm going to put that in. It's a little bit taller than it's supposed to be. So I have to be really careful to not hit it on anything when I put it in. So then I have to wait for this red light to turn off. I think you can see it. It's barely right there, a little red light. This microscope doesn't really have any interlocks. So it'll just let me open this door and let all the air into the vacuum chamber while it's under vacuum. Which is not good for the vacuum pumps. So you just kind of got to be careful. It won't let you do it out of atmosphere because it just takes a lot of effort to do it. But when you're at these kind of intermediate vacuums, it's really easy to cause issues. Luckily it's only 30 seconds. So I'll get my screen share going here. My light turned off. Put the sample in. There was a question in chat. What's the plastic sphere made out of? I don't actually know what type of plastic it is. But I've actually used several different types of plastics to do this. I've used an airsoft pellet before. These are ubiquitous sample holders you'll see in microscope labs all the time. They have little balls on the hinges. So I've used those as these before. This is actually a pretty useful way of just kind of in general inspecting the microscope. Okay. So I am going to share screens here. So that should be going. So we've got our software running right here. If I can see a signal, excellent. We'll turn on the accelerating voltage. So I'm going to start at kind of a high accelerating voltage. I'm going to start at 20,000 volts. And that's because we need to hit the sphere with a high enough charge to kind of get the electrons implanted in it and stuck in it. And then once we've implanted it with really high energy electrons, we'll kind of turn the voltage down. And then instead of the electrons just hitting it, the electrons will, in theory, bounce off of it and give us what we're looking for. So we can kind of see the sphere here. You can see there's the background of the sample holder. Oh, me. It's as far out as it's letting me zoom right now. In the hand. Yeah, so we're just going to turn the probe current up and we're going to start to see some kind of things changing shape as we do that. We're really going to turn the probe current up. We'll zoom in just a little bit on the sphere just to really make sure that we get the sphere fully charged up. So I'm kind of, actually what we're seeing right now is the reflections we're seeing. Actually, that is like the internals of the microscope right now. These kind of shapes over here, these are some electron detectors and whatnot. But at this kind of this higher KV, it doesn't. But I can see some texture of the. Yeah. And doing a little bit of beam alignment here. So that's what's making it way brighter. So I think that sphere is looking pretty charged up. So now we're turning the accelerating voltage down to like, we'll go, we're down to 3000 volts. So that's pretty low for this microscope. So now things are looking different because we're at a much lower celebrating potential. So we can see the, you can kind of see the, so that's the sample holder behind it. And so every way that the sphere is now is like actually like a really good electron lens or electron mirror. So that hole we're looking at right there, that is actually where the electrons are coming out. So that is the bottom of the column. Oh, neat. What a cool hack. I love this. Yeah. And then that. It's such a sharp image too. It's amazing how clear it is. So this is the door that I did the sample exchange through earlier. So that's where the sample came in. Those springs are part of the stage. That's kind of what prevents backlash on the stage. And then I've got, so this over here, that thing that's sticking in, that is at the end of this white box here, that is the X-ray spectrometer. So we can get the, we can determine the atomic composition of the materials in the microscope. And then we'll start at the base of this thing. This is the electron detector. Oh yeah. I'm gonna make sure I'm at the right setting. So I don't fry the detector when I look at it too closely. There we go. I turned the beam current down a little bit so that when I go to the front of the detector, I don't like just completely fry it. I can stigma it a little bit, make that a little bit sharper. There we go. Ooh. So it's a, so that kind of curved tube covered in that woven material, that woven material is a copper braid and that curved tube is an acrylic light pipe. So at the very tip of this thing inside that kind of that white disc, that's the actual electron detector. So that is a disc of phosphor and the cage around it is biased at about plus 400 volts because electrons are negatively charged so anything positively charged will attract electrons. And then the disc inside of it is charged to 10,000 volts. So that like really accelerates the electrons and it slams the electrons into it. And then when the electrons slam into it, it turns the electrons into photons or it doesn't turn the electrons into photons, the electrons generate photons or as the orbitals, as electrons lose energy, they generate photons but we can get into that more later. So those photons then travel through the acrylic light pipe that is underneath this braid and then kind of through this part at the end here is where the photomultiplier tube is, which is this tube on the outside of the microscope and that's what amplifies the photons back and it actually turns the photons back into electrons via the photoelectric effect. And then that's how we generate our signal. So I can zoom in on part of the stage mechanism here. I believe this is the stage rotation. What's the thing that's doing the XY scanning? Where is that? Is that like? Yeah, so the thing that's doing the XY scanning is our board right here, the open beam interface which is our open hardware project. Yeah, like where mechanically is that within the chamber? Like is that within the chamber? Yeah, yeah. So the scan coils are actually located kind of right on the inside of this tube here where the electrons are coming out. So there's no mechanical movement, luckily, because the mechanical movement can be like far too slow. So we're using magnetic lenses. So there's a series of four magnetic optics and that's one of the deflectors. And then so opposing pairs can be used to deflect it in one direction and the other set of opposing pairs deflects it in the other direction. But there's actually kind of two of those. There's an upper and a lower set. So the upper set sends the beam out like towards the edge of the column. And then the lower set directs the beam back towards the middle of the column. So it kind of reverses the angle because you always want to travel through the center of the objective lens, which is the very last optic in the microscope. And so above the microscope, you go out and then back in so that when the beam like pivots around one point in space, that's a very sensitive magnetic field. So that it goes through the center of the aperture but then it crosses over and hits whatever XY coordinate you want to scan at. Yeah, yeah. And actually, so some microscopes that hits the center of the aperture. So some microscopes you'd actually see a really small disc right here. But with the way the electron optics work, you can actually like kind of like put the aperture on any of the focal planes. It doesn't have to be on the final focal plane. So in this microscope, the aperture is actually about eight inches above the bottom of the column. Just because you can kind of like, if you're in the same focal plane in the optical path, you can kind of do the same effect in multiple places. So having the aperture above kind of gives us more flexibility to have like a larger diameter hold down here and do more with that. So let's see here. I think I'll be able to show, I think this right here is rotation or it's the Z axis. So that must be rotation. So rotation, so if you look at that universal joint in the top left corner there. Yeah. We can see that rotating a little bit as the sample is moving and all those gears are moving some. Hmm, yeah. So yeah, so that's how you can use a sample as an electron mirror to inspect the inside of your electron microscope. I learned so much today. Yeah, sample is a mirror. This is neat because there's so many things that people are probably familiar with like MRIs, they hear about CERN, like they hear about all the things that you can do with particles. Yeah, this is it in action. What's interesting is that electron microscopes were like it's kind of like this weird black box but now seeing it I'm like, oh, not like seeing like I could build it but I'm like, I see how it could be built. Do you remember? Yeah, yeah. It's like I understand each piece and also understand what your board is doing. It's like, oh, it's controlling those coils and then it gets the reading from that opto sensor. From the photomultiplier tube? And then it just, you know, Coralus, the only issue is you have to like do a lot of calibration to make sure that, you know, your XY maps pixel by pixel but that's how you're getting the signal out. It's just cool. It's not easy, it's hard, but it's like I get it. And then as time goes on here, we're gonna be building more and more open source electronics so that we can start to actually kind of like drive those like deflectors directly. So currently we're relying on the microscope itself to do all of the like balancing between those deflectors to make the signal well aligned and everything. And we're just telling the microscope like, hey, put the beam in X and Y here and then it uses a bunch of like analog math to figure that out. And so we're gonna figure out kind of a better way of doing that where we just directly talk to each individual coil instead of letting the microscope do that. So. This is outstanding. All right, well, keep coming back every week. You'll look into chat later. People really like this and they have some questions that you might be able to answer later. I still do. Yeah, I think it's kind of neat. You're using open source hardware to look at the ultimate open source hardware which is the standard model. It's out there. It's out there waiting for you to discover more. It's available, it's there, it's math. We could build anything with it. Anyone can do anything with it. You just have to know the code. Okay, enough. Yeah, just have to look for it. All right. I think somebody was so obsessed with like, how do I look at tiny things that they invented this machine? Like that's, or like a Goopa people were like, so they're so like entranced with this idea. I think electron microscopes are neat too because it's not that necessarily it was invented as much as the things were discovered and then enabled the hardware. It's like, we're getting blasted by neutrinos and everything right now. This is all going on everywhere, but this is a way to work. Yeah, and electron microscopes really like grew with electronics too. So at first we had electron microscopes that couldn't scan at all. You could just kind of do like a 2D projection of a really thin sample. And it was like 20 or 30 years after the first invention of them that we were able to like have electronics that were good enough to like make them scan. Yeah. So that's, so yeah. I really think they're like, it's everything that particle accelerator does just in like a package that's like the right size. Yeah. So it's really fun. It should be all salesman for your own like scan. Like door to door salesman. That's it. Not to ding on CERN and everything, but I don't know if they're going to find anything else besides the Higgs boson. So this is actually kind of more useful, more useful thing to, if you want, if you're interested in this stuff, this is something I think obtainable that people could potentially do. Yeah. We're trying to make it more attainable. Like before this thing existed, you couldn't save images off of any microscopes without spending a lot of money or getting really, really lucky on eBay. So now that you can, there's like a reasonably very solution to actually like save pictures off of an vintage microscope. So I think these things are going to start to become a little bit more assessable as it is. All right. We'll come by next week and thank you so much for sharing. This is great. Well, thank you so much. You have a good evening. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much everybody. This is the tiniest, best thing I've seen today. So charged. We'll see everybody next week. Ask an engineer starts in just a few moments.